Charles' Raven or Mystique
by NotMarge
Summary: She was once Raven. She will one day be the powerful Mystique. For now, she's somewhere in between, trying to find her way.
1. Stepping Out

I do not own X-Men anything.

Except all the dvds. Even the bad ones.

Charles' Raven or Mystique?

Stepping Out

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><p>"You don't need to hide now."<p>

Raven, codenamed Mystique, stood lovely, blue scaled and redhaired and yellow-eyed in her natural mutant form.

She was near the rumpled four poster bed in which she had slept since arriving at their Spanish hideaway from Cuba. And she now refrained from reaching out a suddenly trembling hand to brace against it.

She had instinctively masked with herself in her basic standby attire of a super short skirt, tall black boots, and a plunging neckline.

None of it was real of course. But for her it was what she always done, picked a fashion and conjured it up in her mind.

Sometimes, if something really surprised or upset her, she'd lose her focus for a moment and one boot would go blue or the neckline would drop to her belly button before she caught hold and reformed the image in her mind.

Hadn't happened in forever though. She'd gotten really good at cloaking herself over the years. No matter what she had told Charles whenever she'd purposefully scared away one of his little bar tramps.

Charles.

She had woken up that morning alone.

Erik, risen early, or perhaps not slept at all, was nowhere to be seen.

But that had not been her first thought, her first concern.

Her first thought had been, _I left him_.

And she'd felt instantly overwhelmed with guilt and sorrow and regret and worry.

_I left my brother bleeding in the sand on a beach in Cuba._

And everything had painfully crumpled up inside her, like a ball of paper being forcefully wadded up.

Followed by another voice, Erik's voice, echoing in her head.

_He was not your brother._

But he had been. For years and years. Since she had first snuck into his mansion to feed her starving belly and seek shelter from the cold rain. Just for the night.

_He took care of me all those years. And when he needed me most, I abandoned him._

Her salty, bitter tears had come then even as Erik's voice responded once more.

_He repressed you all those years. Made you hide. Or have you forgotten the embarrassment he made you feel for your blue form?_

Rolling over in the massive king sized four poster bed, she'd seen Erik's side empty.

Wiped her tears away.

And risen, blue and scaled, to face the new unknown.

But all of this inner turmoil was only part of the new consideration now standing before her.

Erik Lehnsherr. His handsome, predatorial face a smooth mask of calm.

Looking at her, arms straight down at his sides, peaceful.

Waiting.

_You don't need to hide now._

It had been a few days of rest and recovery from the battle.

She cloaked herself all that time when around other mutants. Blue natural form, yes.

But under clothes.

And he'd never said a word or gave a hint of discontent about her reflexive decision.

Apparently he had been giving her time to do it on her own.

And now he was done with it.

She felt a growing disquiet and a slight panic welling up from within her core.

"But . . . they'll look at me. I'll be exposed, naked in front of everyone."

He did not nod, neither did he shake his head. In fact, he did not move at all. Not a twitch, not a muscle.

So very still.

"Yes, you will be."

She clenched her jaw at the notion as he continued to speak in that quiet, honest tone.

"And they will look."

She tried to appear as unemotional as he seemed to be, standing there before her, fully clothed and groomed.

He who wouldn't be having them staring at his unshielded body.

"You would have them look at me naked?"

The fleeting image flashed through her mind of presenting herself in just that way to Charles only days before in his kitchen.

That had been different though. It had been night and dim and he had been the only one there. And she, she had been empowered and free and feeling wild and untamed in her newly appreciated form.

And she'd been trying to make an impression on him, a statement, to hurt him as he had hurt her by forcing her to hide all these years. Him who could pass, him who had no need to hide. Because all of his powerful, natural mutation was on the inside.

And he, he was always able to have so much fun with his.

Without arousing any suspicions at all.

But this, her walking amongst them unadorned, this was much more of a challenging than simply confronting Charles alone in the dead of night.

And there were more of them to see her.

And Erik Lehnsherr was still talking.

"They _will_ look at your perfection, at your power, your wild beauty. And they _will_ want you. And they will want to _be_ you."

His eyes smoldered for a brief moment and she saw the fire behind them. Fire for her. Fire for her freedom from the chains of mutant repression.

"You must accept yourself and walk freely among your own kind if you are to be with us," he declared quietly. "And if you are not, you cannot stay."

She looked at him and he stared steadily right back at her.

His gaze, his stance, his belief unblinking, unbending, unyielding.

She thought of them.

Angel. Riptide. Azazel.

They would see her. All of her.

She didn't want them to.

There would be hiding. None at all.

But she didn't want to leave either.

She wanted to be part of them, her free mutant brothers and sisters.

And so she slowly rippled into her blue form.

It wasn't a sensation she could ever truly describe to anyone in any real way.

The closest parallel she could draw to changing her physical form was flipping over thousands of tiny playing cards to reveal a new image. Except it happened to every outward cell in her body. Or only a few at a time if she so chose.

Though that really didn't explain the experience of it at all.

When she had reverted to her true, natural form and felt the slight release in the corner of her mind where her visual image concentration center lay, she looked at Erik.

Who smiled then, just a little.

"Perfection."

* * *

><p>And he was right, they did look when she appeared before them in the lights of the parlor.<p>

Most of them.

As she stood, trying to look casual and calm when really her insides were roaring and rolling, it was Angel, beautiful Angel with her flittering wings and exotic eyes who spoke first.

"Oh, Raven, you're absolutely beautiful!"

Beyond her, the well-suited Riptide, whose real name was Janos, looked at her with his deep, penetrating Spanish gaze.

"And you look like this all the time?" his accented voice questioned lightly.

She shook her head, smoothly picking up an apple from the basket on the dark, polished table beside her.

"Only when I want to," she replied, defiantly easy in her tone.

Then she rippled into exact replica of the man himself and tossed him the apple.

He fumbled it as his mouth fell open in shock and Angel tittered in delight, clapping her hands happily like a child.

Azazel, however, leaned against a high stool in the corner, polishing his blades, completely uninterested. He never so much as glanced at her.

And despite her timidity concerning her exposed form, she wondered why.

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><p><strong>Hello, X-Men fans! :D<strong>

**I had a thought that Raven didn't magically poof into the cold, brutal Mystique the instant she left Charles on that beach, but rather it was an evolution of sorts that she had to work through. **

**And you know me, when I start thinkin', I start writin'.**

**I will not be following any sort of canon (despite my bro-in-law's tongue lashing over how wrong the movies are compared with the comic books), just beginning to bridge the gap between FC and the JFK assassination when she and Erik part ways for ten years and she's left to her own devices.**

**So, interested?**

**Everybody appreciates feedback. Leave a review if you like.**


	2. Stalking the Prey

I do not own X-Men anything.

Except all the dvds. Even the bad ones.

Charles' Raven or Mystique

Stalking the Prey

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><p>The space was quiet, waiting, watching.<p>

The two combatants circled each other like wild creatures, looking, seeking a killing strike.

She moved slowly, trying to keep her movements controlled and matched with his. Every time he moved, she moved in the opposite direction the exact same distance, the exact same speed.

Raven Darkholme had never been a fighter. Not physically anyway. She'd always found the narrow minded idiots of the world easy enough to defeat with a silver tongue and a little intimidation.

All that was changing.

She was part of Erik's world now.

And it was more dangerous than she ever could have imagined.

And Mystique needed to learn how to defend herself in an attack.

Camouflage was important but sometimes there was nothing left but to fight.

She wasn't very good at it.

Not yet.

She was weak and her mind did not swirl with combat techniques and strategies.

Erik wasn't much of a fighter. He didn't need to be; he controlled metal. And metal was everywhere.

But she was only her.

And that wasn't good enough. Not yet.

And so here they were.

Her and Azazel.

In Janos' Spanish hideaway. An abandoned room, cleared of furniture, paintings, and tapestries. The windows were blacked out. The sconces were high and flickering. The floor was hard, polished dark wood.

And she was trying to keep pace with the red devil.

Erik had directed him not to use his teleportation powers, only combat skills to teach her to fight.

And his twin blades.

His ice blue eyes bore into her yellow ones as he stalked her.

He never seemed to blink; she felt as though he was hypnotizing her.

She was trying to forget that she was revealed to him, in her blue scales and bare feet. She was trying to forget that he could see her and touch her in this fight.

She was having a lot of trouble with that.

But Erik had said future attackers would take her natural form as distraction and see it as vulnerability, weakness. Especially because she was a woman. Then she could use their miscalculations against them and turn any confrontation to her own advantage.

She tried to remember that.

She tried to be tough.

But in stark reality, she just wanted to put some clothes on.

Her heart pounded in her chest as they continued their serpentine dance. She forced herself to control her breathing and managed to refrain from licking her dry lips.

She noticed, not for the first time, the long scar slicing through his left eye and dimly wondered who could possibly have gotten close enough to wound him.

Other than Beast of course.

Beast.

Hank.

That had ended so badly.

He seemed so sweet and earnest when they'd first met. And didn't really know how fantastic or special he was.

Charles had never truly understood what it was like for her to have to hide all the time. But Hank did.

Hank and those amazing feet of his.

She'd thought she'd found a kindred spirit. Someone who could help her look normal.

But somewhere along the path between Charles and Erik, she'd changed.

And Hank hadn't.

She'd tried to make him see his possibility, his beauty. Tried to encourage him to embrace it. And accept himself for the perfect mutant he really was.

But he'd held his ground, dug in with those desperate, stubborn mutant feet of his.

And she'd had to let him go.

She hoped he was happy, wished him well.

She wished that. . .

Azazel's sudden movement caught her off guard. He was lunging toward her in attack, blades cutting through the air with deadly force.

She flung herself into a backward dip to avoid having her head sliced off and he took his forward momentum to whirl around her and catch her from behind, a strangling arm locked around her neck.

She shifted her weight forward now, rolling him over her back to slam down onto the floor. He responded with a fierce kick to the face that crashed her gracelessly to the floor.

He pounced then like a tall, lanky, suited demon and landed on top of her, pinning her arms and legs down. She was out of space to run, out of maneuvers to use.

He had her trapped, absolutely incapacitated with no escape whatsoever.

Her rattled mind reeled, scrambling to catch up with her physical situation and the reality behind it. He had been toying with her the entire time, not once ever being out of control of the situation.

And now she was caught and he could kill her, end her existence, in the blink of an eye if he chose.

Because she wasn't strong enough.

Over his shoulder moved his tail. Deadly sharp and slowly taking direct aim for her right eye. She froze for fear that she would inadvertently impale herself on it.

His eyes cut into her like shards of blue glass. He did not smile; he did not sneer.

He simply drove his gaze into her eyes, through her brain, and punched out the veneer of the hardwood floor.

She had never felt so exposed in all her life.

"You must never lose focus from your enemy," he reprimanded her bluntly. "Makes you weak. And you die."

He held her there under his absolute control, his red, arrow-like weapon inches from piercing her eye.

She swallowed her fear, her shame, her weakness and spoke with as much mettle in her tone as she could muster.

"Aright, you've made your point. Now let me go."

He didn't move. He didn't blink. He didn't utter a word.

He was testing her resolve, her fortitude, her grit.

He wanted to see if she would break and beg.

She held her voice as low and deadly as possible on her next words.

"_Now_."

They remained where they were a moment longer. Still as statues, silent as sphinx.

Then he bampfed away and she was left alone, flat out on the floor. Abandoned to ponder how she was going to become tough enough to beat him.

Him and everybody else.

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><p><strong>Raven never really fights in FC. She just screams and argues and watches others fight. In DoFP, she's like Amazon Warror Princess. So somebody taught her right?<strong>

**Plus, Azazel is soooo awesome when he fights! **

**Thanks to MoonlitShadowsoftheHumanSoul, brigid1318, grandprincessanastasiaromanov5, and that GypsyWriter for all your encouragement and supportive reviews.**

**Thanks also to Wholocked221 for adding your support here too.**


	3. Connect and Disconnect

I do not own X-Men anything.

Except all the dvds. Even the bad ones.

Charles' Raven or Mystique?

Connect and Disconnect

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><p>She woke up alone in dark.<p>

She always woke up alone.

She might be able to convince him to come to bed with her but when she woke up, she was inevitably alone.

She peered through the darkness and finally spotted his lanky shadow in a tall chair, facing the window. One hand cupping his chin, staring out at the blackness beyond the glass.

She left the bed and went to his side, restraining herself from wrapping the sheet around her bare blue form.

Sat on the arm of the chair.

He absently put an arm around her curves without looking at her.

Ran her fingers through his hair.

He didn't respond to her touch.

Then he spoke.

"I'll be leaving in the morning. Early. I'll be gone for a few days."

She knew she shouldn't be surprised at this sudden statement, not the elusive Erik. But she was all the same.

"Where?"

He didn't answer.

"I'll come with you."

She felt him imperceptively draw away from her without moving a muscle or batting an eyelash.

"No."

His voice quiet, calm, decisive. Emotionless.

"Why? I can . . . help with whatever . . ."

She knew he would say no. And mean it.

"No."

But she wasn't' ready to be left alone. Not yet.

"Are you . . ."

_. . . angry with me?_

No, she couldn't say that.

"Did . . ."

_. . . I do something wrong?_

No, she couldn't say that either.

There were so many things he kept from her. So many things he never said. And so many things she couldn't say.

Not to him.

And her thin veneer cracked.

"Well what do you expect me to _do_ while you're gone? Just sit and twiddle my thumbs and _wait_ for you?"

Her tone was tense, angry, and impassioned. Because she was struggling to control her roiling emotions, her tangled feelings.

One of them had to have feelings.

And he had none. Not since his breakdown on the beach.

She knew she was going about this all wrong. She was trying to appeal to his humanity. He wouldn't respond to that.

Because he didn't have any left to appeal to.

Not because he was a mutant.

But because he was Erik.

"There are others here," he stated calmly, as if speaking to an unreasonable child. "You are not alone and abandoned."

She clenched her jaw in frustration.

"But I followed _you_, Erik. I didn't follow _them_."

Finally he turned to her. His eyes in the shadows were deep, bottomless pits that she could not read.

As if she ever could.

"You are beautiful and strong and intelligent. You are not a helpless child to be led around by the hand."

His voice was smooth and calm as always, but his words set chills and panic through her

"But . . . you're our _leader_."

She tried to keep the pleading out of her voice. He wouldn't respond well to weakness. He didn't respect it.

"Yes. And one day, you will be a leader too."

She shook her head ruefully.

"No, not me. Who would listen to me?"

He did look at her then and his eyes went to pure steel. She felt a flash of fear even as he spoke, his voice remaining as insufferably mild as always.

"If you want people to listen to you, _make_ them listen. Be strong and _make_ them."

She flailed about for something, anything to say to him. Anything at all.

And could think of none.

None that would do any good anyway.

Erik's face was turned outward again. He was gone from her even if his body remained here.

So they sat for a while as he stared out the window and hid his thoughts from her and she listened to her own breathing and tried to find some way to keep him with her a little longer.

There was only one.

And it wasn't a good choice.

But it would pass the time anyway.

And give her the sense of connection she was looking for.

So gathering all of her strength and courage, she put away her worries and fears of tomorrow and all the days after that. She tossed them into a box in her mind and closed the lid.

The she slid into his lap and turned his face to her, stroking his skin with her scaly fingertips. Seductively nuzzled his ear with her blue lips and let her hands wander. When she spoke, her voice was sultry and low.

"Well, before you go, can I at least say goodbye to you first?"

He let her.

* * *

><p>And just as he said, in the morning, he was gone.<p>

She woke up alone.

The crumpled sheets next to her held no residual warmth at all in their fibers.

She knew without anyone telling her, that he had already left.

Left her alone.

And she with her hard outer scales, felt weak inside and cried clear, salty tears down her blue face.

She made sure to bury her face in her pillow so no one hear a sound, that no one heard her weakness at all.

And when she was done, she went into the bathroom and washed her face free of tears and vulnerability.

Then she went out to face them, her back stiff and straight and her emotions locked firmly away.

Mere weeks had passed since Cuba.

And now she was lost and uncertain all over again.

But she sure wasn't going to let them know that.

* * *

><p>"Well, what does he expect us to do while he's gone?" Angel questioned, her voice riddled with confusion and dismay. "Just sit around and wait for his return like little lost children?"<p>

Raven shrugged. Faking much more confidence than she felt.

"You can do what you want," she replied lightly to her friend. "I'm going to work on kicking his red-tailed butt."

She dismissively gestured toward Azazel's skulking frame, completely withdrawn as always. Polishing his blades.

And ignoring her.

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><p><strong>Well, you knew he wasn't going to stick around real long, right? I mean this is Erik we're talking about. <strong>

**Thanks to brigid1318, the1upguy, MoonlitShadowsoftheHumanSoul, and IAmARebel22 for your reviews. I really appreciate you guys! **

**Thanks as well to the silent readers out there and I hope you are enjoying this story as well. :)**


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